Basic LaTeX support

[AdrianoFerrari]

No description provided.

[AdrianoFerrari]

Investigating how MathJax works, it seems that it's unlikely that we'll be able to use it without losing the power and simplicity of Elm's virtual DOM. Mathjax v3 will allow more options for this, but it's in pre-alpha.

Packages exist for other LaTeX rendering engines (e.g. bsouthga/elm-katex), but they are not compatible with elm-markdown, and generally not mature yet.

Will revisit this later.

[cben]

[Hi. Coming here from your announcement. I've long liked the idea of Gingko though to be honest don't remember why I didn't stick with it, didn't try the new one yet but looking forward to it!]

I'm not familiar with Elm but I suppose what you'd like best is a pure function from latex string to DOM?
MathJax has 2 major problems here:

1. It wants to measure width/heights of parts to layout the whole. It does this by adding invisible parts to page (in batches) and making browser layout them.
   But nowdays in CHTML and possibly SVG mode, it can work "headless", producing fixed HTML.
2. It's inherently async. You queue typesetting, then a callback. I think this originated because (1) was necessary anyway, but they also use it extensively to load things on demand.

KaTeX aviods both problems.

https://github.com/evancz/elm-markdown says it's based on marked — it might be easy to drop in https://github.com/GitbookIO/kramed, a fork of marked that includes kramdown-like math?? (I really don't know what I'm talking about here! :) Better yet, someone already started replacing it with markdown-it, for which numerous math plugins exist: evancz/elm-markdown#19

ref mathjax/MathJax#1763 (which I guess you saw), https://github.com/andre-dietrich/elm-mathjax to watch (currently empty), https://hackernoon.com/towards-latex-in-the-browser-2ff4d94a0c08 (not sure if relevant)

[AdrianoFerrari]

Thanks for your research on this, @cben .

Yes, a pure "latex string to DOM" JS function would be ideal. There might be a way to hack something with that as a starting point.

But, I won't (and don't recommend) starting on that path yet. Elm 0.19 is going to be coming out, and my understanding is that it'll be disallowing JS in elm packages, so that'll likely be a dead end.

I'll have a closer look at https://github.com/jxxcarlson/minilatex though. @jxxcarlson has been working hard on getting Elm and LaTeX to work together, and has been in contact with the creator of Elm, so he's on the leading edge of this.

[heteloo]

Are you working on implementing latex...???

[rmfkdehd]

What are the top priorities on your roadmap?
How important a goal is LATEX support?
Latex loading on gingkoapp.com is too slow.